CANADIAN VIGOUR CENTRE
Bridging hearts and minds to enhance cardiovascular care
Inside this issue: Letter 1 PW Armstrong
The Canadian Cardiac Chronicle Volume 17, No. 2
Fall 2013
Letter from Dr. Paul Armstrong: Recently I have been engaged with my colleagues at the Canadian VIGOUR Centre in creating our annual report for 2012, which celebrates CVC’s 15th year as an ARO (academic research organization), and a significant wealth of trial experience, along with peer reviewed publications and ample mentoring opportunities for our next generation of health researchers. The exercise of generating an annual report gives me pause to reflect on our collective contributions to date, but also to examine and articulate our future direction(s) as it relates to our overall role in the cardiovascular research arena in Canada and our raison d’être. As part of our annual faculty Advance (I avoid Retreats), we illustrated our organizational purpose and future direction into what we term the CVC Compass, as borrowed from the Harvard Business Review’s assessment of the Four Seasons Hotel approach. This compass is now displayed on the back cover of this edition of the Chronicle, in our latest annual report, as well as our web site (http://www.vigour.ualberta.ca/About.aspx). This exercise of “calibrating our compass”, that is, setting our objectives and strategic priorities, has helped us in reflecting on who we are and where we are headed. I also believe it will be useful to new staff and our community of investigators and many colleagues worldwide.
Trial Updates
2-5
Although the term ARO is in common use, its meaning is less clear: ironically this is especially true for many of our colleagues within the university and health care environment. Four years ago I attempted a definition which still resonates and is referred to in our annual report. I include it here to remove unnecessary ambiguity:
Monitoring
6
CVC News
6
“An ARO in my view possesses scholarly values of inquiry and truth, shares knowledge in an ethical framework, is dedicated to enhancing public health, and values discovery, novel approaches and methodologies over profit. It strives to achieve the operational efficiency of a CRO (contract research organization) and is directly linked to patient care and the bedside. It is almost always embedded in a university, functions on a not-for-profit basis, is committed to the education of the next generation of professionals and fulfills its contract with society by emphasizing the public good.”
CVC Publications
7-8
In these challenging times for clinical research, collaborators are key to a preferred future. Our faculty has been significantly strengthened by the addition of Shaun Goodman from the University of Toronto who is also an Adjunct Professor of Medicine at the University of Alberta. Shaun is now playing a leadership role in two of our major CVC trials described elsewhere in the Chronicle and is actively engaged in our overall activities. This development signals a new east-west Canadian axis in clinical research. A key responsibility Shaun holds, as the Heart & Stroke Foundation Polo Chair, is to assist in mentoring young clinical investigators, a commitment we enthusiastically share. We continue and have recently enriched our long standing collaboration with the Duke Clinical Research Institute, now led by Eric Peterson. This north-south axis is key to the future of our collaborative North American research endeavors as an ARO and fundamental to where our compass points. As this edition of the Chronicle takes flight, our attention turns to the Canadian Cardiovascular Society meeting in Montreal October 17-20th where our PROACT work will unfold and the American Heart Association meeting in November where new insights from STREAM into aborted MI, the approach to rescue coronary intervention and the much anticipated one year follow up, will be presented. We invite our many friends and co-investigators to join us during the 19th annual Beyond 2000 symposium to be held Thursday morning October 17, 2013 and look forward to seeing them participate in what promises to be a terrific program as noted in this edition of the Chronicle. For more information on the Beyond 2000 symposium, please go to the website www.beyond2000.org. With kind regards,
CVC is proud to be a University of Alberta Centre
Paul W. Armstrong, MD
www.vigour.ualberta.ca